As I grow older, I spend a fair amount of time observing my brain. Am I the same person I was yesterday? A year ago? Ten years ago? Every time I misplace my car keys, I wonder, “Is this forgetfulness normal or reflective of my aging brain?” It’s a curious feeling to use the brai

Don’t ask me why, but when readers subscribe to my blog, the system ignores the request and sends an email asking for verification. Subscribers who fail to reply eventually write me to ask why my blogs aren’t arriving. In the past, I knew how to fix the problem. Recently, however,

On Christmas eve I attended an annual luncheon with a few close friends and sat talking with a young woman whose career was in health services. “Can you imagine?” she asked, turning her wide, blue eyes in my direction. “People are making such a fuss over the NSA instead of the c

While Edward Snowden cools his heels in the Russian winter, the world continues its heated debate on the good or ill he accomplished when he released volumes of information about NSA’s data mining. Few in this country are coming to the young man’s defense, though foreign leaders h

I was reading an article about how the “upper crust” lives, recently. The report concerned a training school for domestic staff who were destined to serve the super rich. (“You Rang?” by John P. Davidson, Harper’s, Jan. 2014 pgs. 41-56) What caught my eye was the reason behi

During the Christmas holidays, I had coffee with a woman who marveled that I had time to read the many articles and books I refer to in my daily blogs. My response was to shrug and say that using other people’s ideas as a basis for my own was easier than being original. I wasn’t

“…only a lucky writer can write a classic, and it’s only a rare classic that can be perennially relevant.” So writes Lauren Groff in her essay, “The Lost Yearling” (Harper’s, Jan. 2014, pgs. 89-94), a eulogy of sorts, for the fading Pulitzer prize book, The Yearling, wri

A few evenings ago I watched a television program about a group of New York police officers who were obliged to perform their sleuthing duties while wearing hazmat suits. Seeing them at their computers or attempting to answer cell phones through protective gloves and helmets provided

In 1999, Dava Sobel won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Galileo’s Daughter, and I was lucky enough to find a copy in my neighborhood library box. At the time, it was hailed as a “wonderful narrative filled with outsized characters all marching toward a booming climax.” (The

Elon Musk, creator of Pay Pal, the electric car, Tesla, and SpaceX, a commercial enterprise for space exploration, has come up with a unique description for the creative mind. In his view such a mind isn’t satisfied with fitting old parts together in new way. A creative mind throws